World Cultures Sharing Day at Derby Museum and Art Gallery

MEG members are invited to a World Cultures Sharing Day, at Derby Museum and Art Gallery on Monday 25th September, from 10.30am to 3.30pm.

Derby Museum and Art Gallery are in the early stages of a two year co-produced exhibition to share objects from around the world, looking to understand the collection in past and current world contexts, to encourage debate and discussion and to strengthen our relationship with many the diverse communities in Derby.

A main focus of the exhibition will be the world cultures collection - Derby have a small but interesting collection of around 1,500 objects from all over the world, particularly Africa and Oceania but also Asia, the Middle East, South America and North America. Much of it is being researched for the first time for this exhibition, by a team of volunteer researchers and interested specialists.

You are invited for a day of informal discussion and activity. Derby would like to share some of the objects from store and their co-production approach with the exhibition so far. There will be opportunity to hear about other world cultures related projects going on in the UK, meet with other specialists and discuss ideas for collaboration.

The event is free and there will be light refreshments. There is a range of great cafes and sandwich shops close by for lunch.

Please contact Rachel Atherton, Co-production Curator to book your place. 

TELEPHONE +44 (0)1332 641906 www.derbymuseums.org

Call for Papers: Cloth & Costume in Ethnographic Museums: New Directions in Research, Care & Interpretation

Detail of Ainu coat, Japan. Made from brown and blue striped cotton trade cloth and decorated with European lace. Pitt Rivers Museum 1892.56.12. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 

MEG Annual Conference Thursday 6th-Friday 7th April 2017
The Hunterian & Centre for Textile Conservation, University of Glasgow

Call for Papers:

Cloth & Costume in Ethnographic Museums: New Directions in Research, Care & Interpretation

The 2017 conference theme addresses cloth and costume. Cloth is a unique technology: Light and flexible but presenting large surfaces and capable of taking innumerable colours and structures, it covers and divides things, reveals and connects them. Clothing and costuming the body - to protect and conceal it, to make it beautiful or terrifying, to transform or display its many identities – bring persons and statuses into the performed social world. Since remote prehistory, cloth and costume have both created demands and opportunities for humans to devise many of our most ingenious, delicate and technically complicated artefacts.

From Inuit gut parka to ancient Nazca textiles, traditional West African grand boubou costume to Maasai beadwork, Scottish plaid to Italian tapestries, Persian rugs to Indian sari to Balinese dance masks, Bismarck Archipelago masquerade puppets to Samoan barkcloth lavalava; the cloth and costume in our World Cultures collections are immensely rich, diverse and culturally significant. In recent centuries, cloth and costume have also become important material sites for the contestation of identities and moralities, economic globalisation and colonial acculturation. From the worldwide trade in European mill-woven, chemically dyed and printed textiles, to the battles of Christian missionaries with imagined states of immoral native undress, to the recent conflict between the French government and wearers of hijab and burkini, the globalisation of Western dress conventions has powerfully impacted on the world’s other material cultures.

Detail of the design on a batik jacket, part of a girl's costume, China. Pitt Rivers Museum 2000.34.3 .1. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 

How, then, do we weave together these many strands in the ethnographic museum? What is the current state of research into world cultures cloth and costume collections, and what new approaches are we developing to understand them better? How are historical textiles and costume being curated in the world’s museums, and reimagined in the world’s contemporary art scenes? Are we engaging with contemporary world fashion, or trapped in perpetuating stereotypical imaginings of an ‘authentically dressed’ ethnographic past that may never have existed? How can we collections manage these challenging objects better? What are the particular conservation problems of ethnographic textiles and costume, and how can we better care for them in the future? How are we exhibiting cloth and clothing in 2017? Are we capitalising on costume’s universal appeal in our displays and education programmes?

Titles and 200-word abstracts for papers addressing these and other questions are warmly welcomed from all. Two standard formats are offered to presenters: A full Conference Paper to last twenty minutes, and a shorter ten minute Work in Progress presentation. Please email your proposed title, abstract and format choice (or any queries) to Andrew Mills by Monday 6th February. Full details on registration, accommodation and the programme will be published in the New Year. 

Pacific Collections at Royal Museums Greenwich: MEG Collections Visit

Pacific Collections at Royal Museums Greenwich

9 September 2016 1 to 4pm

Royal Museums Greenwich has a small but significant World Cultures collection developed from British maritime exploration in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Pacific artefacts come predominantly from two famous collecting endeavours: James Cook’s three voyages in the 1760s and 70s, and the activities of the London Missionary Society from the 1790s. 

 

Work on a new Pacific gallery for the National Maritime Museum, to open in May 2018, provides the opportunity to revisit these collections, increasing the Museum’s understanding of them, and, through collaboration with Pacific communities, adding much-needed indigenous voices. 

 

We invite MEG colleagues to join us for the afternoon examining our collections and sharing expertise. We would particularly welcome assistance from colleagues knowledgeable on tapa cloth and war clubs, in which our collections are particularly strong. Due to restrictions on store access, the visit will be capped at 15.

PLEASE EMAIL TONY ECCLES to book your place.

SPECTRUM 5.0 Consultation- Take Part Now!

Help improve SPECTRUM: the UK Collection Management Standard.

What’s happening?

The Collections Trust are consulting widely to check that SPECTRUM still meets the needs of museums large and small. This will inform the next revision, SPECTRUM 5.0, to be published in 2017.
They want to know whether SPECTRUM reflects current practice in your kind of museum, so please take a moment to complete the short online survey. You can also sign up to get more deeply involved in the revision process.
SPECTRUM aims to be relevant and useful to museums of all types and sizes, and to everyone who works with collections in any way, so the whole museum community will benefit.

1.    Review your use and understanding of the SPECTRUM Standard

2.    Answer an online survey

3.    Take part in the discussion on social media and follow #SPECTRUM5

Identifications for the Kent and Sussex Uniques project

Australian headdress 1997.5 Bexhill, BEXHM : 1997.5

This is described as a ‘Headdress with parrot feathers’, and was donated by a Miss C P Wills. I think these are emu feathers because of the similarity of the feathers to a Leeds example, LEEDM.F.1970.0010:

The Leeds example has an old label: "Head ornament of emu feathers worn by aboriginal men at some of their dances. N.Queensland”. Unfortunately the source details are lost, and now recorded as Unknown. The date is estimated at 1890-1920.

As laid out in the photo the Leeds headdress looks more like a waist ornament (?). The Bexhill example seems to have a much thicker group of cord ties at the sides, and the feather strands seem very untidy. As Len Pole comments, It is 'impossible to see what this might look like without putting it on a head-shaped mount; it could be imposing’. Do the cords separate out to form a semi-regular fringe? Or when worn would the fringe be spiralled round to make a chunky cluster or plume? The most frequent good photos online of Queensland emu feather headdresses are of a Mornington Island type headdress, from the Gulf of Carpentaria, north Queensland. For example, see the discussion thread 'Australian Aboriginal artifacts 8 – Mornington Island ceremonial headdress’ 

This took me to a photo of a similar headdress at the National Museum of Australia which has lots of contextual historical detail.

Gambling tokens, Sudan? Bexhill Museum BEXHM : 2004.5.23

This group of engraved brown nut shells are presumed to be gambling tokens, one is said to be carved with a sexual symbol.. they are used in a gambling game banned for its destructive influence. Sudan. Len Pole says see similar examples at Powell-Cotton museum.

I had not come across anything like these before, but some of the designs look similar to modern gourd carvings from West Africa, particularly one piece from Ghana, which is possibly Asante.

Carved gourd ornament, Ghana, 1960-1980. Leeds LEEDM.F.2009.5.30. Transferred from Hampshire County Museum and Archive Service.

I checked out Brazil seed carvings on this website but nothing similar there.

There is a huge range of game counters illustrated on these pages at Etsy, but again no direct similarities, and nothing either here which has a good list with short descriptions and illustrations of the different board games in Africa.




Large rooster puppet with pendant dangles, Bexhill Museum BEXHM : 1999.35

This is described as “Santali instrument an aboriginal tribe of N. Bengal, wood with bird ornament on top and hanging wooden blocks below”. Wikipedia now has a detailed well-referenced entry on the Santhal or Santal people of India, and they were one of the peoples whose art featured in the Quay Branly exhibition ‘AutreMaitres de L’Inde’ (Other Masters of India) in 2010. However, I found this website difficult to read, and it seems to link closely to another exhibition in Germany on Santal musical instruments. There was nothing here on Santal rooster bird puppets or bird scarers, and similarly there is nothing in another website I was hoping would be useful here.

MEG and Bexhill would love to hear from anyone who has seen similar items to these, or has them in their museum collections. The contact at Bexhill Museum is Julian Porter.

Antonia Lovelace

MEG Chair and Curator of World Cultures, Leeds Museum